i would be happy with the battery management stuff if it was actually managed by the drivers but it seems to be managed by... algorithms?? like, drivers saying they have to drive in a particular and slightly unnatural way to avoid the battery kicking in when they don't want it to seems..... bad. i don't love it. obviously happy to LEARN about it or whatever but that's my concern
so you are totally right that drivers in the cockpit don't have, like, a knob they can turn for 'amount of battery deployment.' from what i can tell, reading through sec. 5 of the 2025 technical regulations and the 2026 ones, this is not (& has not been) mandated by the rules but a decision made by engine manufacturers.
usually, this involves several engine modes, which in 2026 are recharge, boost, and overtake. how and in what amounts these modes charge and deploy energy is completely determined by programming by the team, within the limits defined by the rules. so, when drivers have issues with the way their battery is being deployed in these modes, this is an issue of constructors being new to the system, and needing to adjust their PU modes to driver feedback.¹ like i said in my original post, teams are bad at this right now; they will get better. drivers will never stop complaining (god knows mine never do) but as teams get more experienced with these new PUs, we should arrive back at the usual distribution of complaints about steering, braking, power, and aero balance, instead of an overwhelming concern about power deployment.
why isn’t there a knob or a slider? well, if the balance of charge and deployment is so delicate that teams are having a really difficult time setting it in the PU mode, i think it's probably too delicate to be set from within the cockpit. most things are not controlled by the drivers in the cockpit, and everybody likes it that way: think of how much of the work over a race weekend is in setup changes. the only setting (off the top of my head) that drivers can change on a sliding scale, and not in terms of 'modes,' is brake bias, which is one number that it's very straightforward to feel in the cockpit. my first appearance in talking about cars on tumblr was actually a whitepaper on brake design that i wrote after my sophomore year of college, and while i'm now more dubious of the textbook formulas i used to define the system, i think it's a good place to learn about what brake bias means and understand what i think makes it so easy to feel and adjust in the cockpit.²
i expect (though i don’t know how long it will take) that teams will find an agreeable algorithm for when and how much energy should be charged, stored, and deployed in each mode. from there, the game for drivers is understanding how to get the most out of their cars’ deployment strategy, just like how different cars’ suspension geometries create different racing lines through the corner, but any given geometry has an optimal line for the driver to find.
what is rule-mandated is the maximum amount of total energy flow that can come from each part of the total power unit, and the storage per component, detailed by these figures found on pages 53 and 51 of the 2025 and 2026 rules:
this is the part where i say that all my racecar experience is fully electric, and my thermodynamics professor from sophomore spring is my enemy for life, so you aren't going to get great specifics from me on the mechanics of internal combustion engines. if you check out the technical regs (linked above) you can read the formal definitions of all the parts in the PU system in article 5, section 1 of each.
but, to read these diagrams, you should know that the output of the engine (the crank shaft) is mechanically linked to the MGU-K, which is just a motor. through the transmission, the crank shaft drives the rear axle. the MGU-K is both how the battery is deployed to power the rear axle, and how energy is harvested from the rear axle. when a motor is run backwards, it recharges its power source by taking energy from its output shaft, which is what happens under braking in recharge mode.
you can see then from 2025 to 2026 that the MGU-K and its control unit (referred to as the CU-K in 2026) have doubled in allowed capacity, but the ES, the big battery, hasn't changed in how much it can charge or deploy over a single lap. we're getting to the point where, in order to know more about how this is implemented in the cars, i'd have to be working at a team, and then i wouldn't be allowed to tell strangers on the internet about it. like, when does charge store in the MGU-K, and when in the ES? beyond me. but, i think all sensible questions were answered about 300wds ago, so i’ll stop talking now.
¹it's not clear to me how much of this tuning happens on the side of the engine manufacturer, at the constructor's factory, or whether it's tune-able in the paddock. this affects how responsive teams can be to driver feedback.
²it's also very easy, mechanically, to adjust while the car is driving, in a way i'm not sure applies to the energy deployment systems. vibes-wise, i can see the argument being made for a full power cycle (turn it off and turn it back on again) of the car after PU changes.
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things i am thinking about people hating the new rules
(1) "the cars are slow and this sucks"
it's the first year of a new rule set. REAL safety concerns, like large speed differential between leading and chasing cars at corner entry, should be addressed first, but after that, teams are going to get better at these rules. they sucked at it the first time hybrid came in, too. everyone was porpoising like crazy at the beginning of the LAST rule set. i don't see how this is different. they are bad at the new rules; they get better. it's an engineering competition! constructors are facing a real technical challenge! hell yeah!
(2) "battery management is boring to watch"
at one point in each of our lives, tire management was boring. we each, eventually, decided to learn about tires because it was context that made races more interesting to watch. lots of viewers have done the same about basic aero, or sprung suspensions, or hydraulics, or engine modes within the previous hybrid system. i don't see how this is different.
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